Trivia for
Blindness (2008) More at IMDbPro »

• Producer Niv Fichman became interested in the project back in 1999 when he and Don McKellar, who would write the script, flew to the Canary Islands to talk to the Nobel Prize-winning Portuguese author José Saramago about giving them the film rights to his book. One of Saramago's conditions was that the film must not be set in any recognizable countries.
  
  
• Selected as the opening film at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival.
  
  
• Portuguese Nobel Prize winner José Saramago, the author of the novel upon which the film is based, wanted to attend the premiere of the film at the Cannes Film Festival. His doctors didn't allow him to travel, so the director flew to Lisbon to show him the film.
  
  
• In addition to cutting it, Julianne Moore dyed her signature red hair blonde for the film. This made her very uncomfortable because people were giving the new color so much attention.
  
  
• Yusuke Iseya wrote some of the Japanese dialogue.
  
  
• To prepare for the film, the actors, extras and crew participated in "blind camps." They were blindfolded, taken in a car to an unknown location, and left in the middle of the street. However, there were always somebody there to guide them. Despite this, the director claimed that someone would always breakdown.
  
  
• In a banquet address and press release in September 2008 Marc Maurer, president of the National Federation of the Blind, said the organization "condemns and deplores" the movie and the novel it is based upon. He states that the book uses blindness as a "metaphor for all that is bad in human thought and action" while the characters' reactions their blindness are "one-dimensional", while he wrote that in the movie "blind people in this film are portrayed as incompetent, filthy, vicious, and depraved." Protests against the movie have been organized by the group.
  
  
• The music video of the song "Intocable" ("Untouchable"), released by Mexican singer/composer 'Aleks Syntec' in 2007, is also based on the novel 'Blindness' by José Saramago.
  
  
• Several images in the film are directly lifted from the paintings of Lucian Freud. These include the nude woman laying face down on the bed in the mental hospital as well as the man laying on his back with his arm over his face with a whippet at his side.
  
  

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